Email is a bane and a boon and it keeps growing. Email and its sheer size and scope keeps attracting founders – young and old – who are lured by the potential riches. Javier Soltero, co-founder and CEO of Acompli, thinks he has what it takes to win.

Redpoint Ventures has raised a $400 million new fund to invest in early-stage startups, specifically in the areas of mobile and cloud technology, big data, entertainment technology and delivery, and mobile infrastructure companies.

The SDN startup’s Series B round comes courtesy of new investors Redpoint Ventures and Goldman Sachs. The money will be used to staff up an already tech-heavy engineering staff as the company readies its SDN controllers and applications for the market.

Sonos, a ten-year-old company that makes networked connected music hardware has raised a $45 million in new investment from the likes of Elevation Partners, KKR and has added some heavy weights such as John Maeda , president of the Rhode Island School of Design to its board.

When solar maker Solyndra files for bankruptcy it could lose a big chunk of its VC backers $1.1 billion (we’ll see how much any assets go for). That could make it the largest loss for venture capitalists in history.

Is hardware dead? Has the energy gone out of the SaaS market? How has Amazon impacted the economics of it all? Find out in our sit-down interview with Satish Dharmaraj, co-founder of email startup Zimbra, who’s now a partner at Redpoint Ventures.

Formspring, a San Francisco-based social Q&A startup, has raised $10 million in fresh funding in a round led by Redpoint Ventures. Formspring.me is also part of a group of companies trying to capture a piece of a massive web trend: personal expression.

Xmarks, the bookmarks syncing service is shutting down. The San Francisco-based company quietly announced on its website today. The four-year-old company was started by Mitch Kapor, who initially funded the company. Redpoint Ventures later invested in the startup. Xmarks failed to develop a business model.

There are $1.3 billion in venture dollars sitting on the table for startups that can make Verizon’s next generation LTE network better, so I talked to Daniel Deeney who is investing some of those dollars to see what types of companies he’s looking for.